I don't think it's asking too much for politicians who are proposing legislation to know what they are talking about. Ditto for, say, Supreme Court justices who are deciding cases on various issues, or even bureaucrats who are making rules under which we all have to live. But if ignorance was peanut butter, American politicians could make up sandwiches that would stretch from Earth to Tau Ceti.
But I'm in the minority in this assessment. For example, one need look no further than the arguments around one of my personal hot-button issues: The Second Amendment.
Case in point: Recently, my esteemed colleague Nick Arama chronicled Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's staggering ignorance of how bump stocks work and what rates of fire are.
As our sister site PJ Media reported, Jackson joined with a government attorney in some truly silly remarks about bump stocks.
The government says that bump stocks allow you to shoot 600 times a second
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024The government said that bump stocks let you shoot 600 times a second.
Then Justice Jackson made it even worse, saying that they could allow you to shoot 800 times a second.
Justice Jackson says guns with bump stocks can fire 800 rounds a second
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024You can hear her say it twice, including a "whatever," showing she doesn't even care about the accuracy of what she's saying.
Think about that for a moment. A Supreme Court associate justice who is in a position to influence a decision on the constitutionality of a rule placed on gun owners by bureaucratic fiat clearly not only lacks any knowledge of how the item in question works - but doesn't care.
Over at the American Thinker, columnist, USAF veteran, and firearms instructor Mike McDaniel has more examples.
Our mummified meat puppet President, Joe Biden, during a 2020 Democrat candidate debate, infamously claimed 150 million American were killed by guns in the previous few years, which would comprise just under half the country. He also claims double barreled shotguns to be the best possible home-defense weapon, far easier to shoot than an AR-15. He has argued appropriate double barreled shotgun tactics include blindly shooting through closed doors, and stepping outside to fire warning shots straight up. He has also claimed the police should always shoot attacking, armed felons in the leg, and has argued armed citizens that saved lives by stopping church attackers should not have been armed.
All such advice is either illegal, blatantly stupid, both, or would result in officers and innocents being injured or killed.
Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee tells us the AR-15, a specimen of which she claims to have handled, is absolutely horrifying. It’s heavier than “10 boxes” and fires a “.50 caliber” cartridge. Other than being a rifle sufficiently light for 10-year-old girls to comfortably handle—about 6.5 pounds--and other than chambering a .22 caliber cartridge, she’s right.
See Related: Trump's Bump Stock Ban Not Likely to Survive the Supreme Court
Politicians are not alone in this; there are plenty of journalists who are in the habit of displaying their ignorance about firearms or worse, in two cases that come to mind, outright lying. The first: New York Daily News scribe Gersh Kuntzman, who described firing an AR-15:
The actual experience of firing the AR15 was nothing less than traumatizing. The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.
None of this can be true. The 5.56mm cartridge fired by the AR-15 is relatively low-powered. Its hunting rifle counterpart, the .223 Remington, is considered a good cartridge for woodchucks, prairie dogs, and maybe coyotes. Unless Mr. Kuntzman is left-handed, no brass shell casings flew past his face. The AR-15 ejects cases to the right and downward. And modern smokeless propellants contain no sulfur. Unless Kuntzman was firing 5.56mm cartridges inexplicably loaded with black powder, he smelled no sulfur. As for smelling “destruction,” that is a hyper-emotional horse squeeze.
Then we have the San Francisco Chronicle's Christine Lavin, describing her fending off a supposed attacker with her Glock:
I opened my glove compartment, took out my Glock 17, and flipped off the safety. It was the first time it had ever come out of the glove compartment for any reason other than target practice. I rolled down the driver’s window and held the gun in front of my chest in both hands, as I’d been taught.
When I first read this piece, my immediate thought - having a few Glocks in the gun safe myself - was: "What safety?" Anyone who has any experience with Gaston Glock's works knows that the Glock handguns have no manual safety - there is no "safety" to "flip off." It's difficult in the extreme to come up with any conclusion other than that Christine Lavin made up this whole event out of whole cloth.
Is it too much to ask that people who argue for gun control be arsed to learn something about firearms? At the very least, enough to know that they will be caught when they make up stories or that a particular statement - see Sheila Jackson Lee's quote above - would make someone who actually knows something about guns burst out laughing?
We live in a time when health care policy is written by lawyers, gun control laws are drafted by people who know nothing about guns, and economic policy is decided by people who have never worked in the economy - or if they have, it was as a bartender. This is part of our descent into kakistocracy. While a free republic must have a well-informed electorate to be sustainable (I question how well we're doing there), it may be even more important to have well-informed representation, at least to the point where they bother to ascertain, you know, facts before proposing legislation.
That's probably expecting too much - and that's too bad. America needs a better class of political leaders; the problem is that our kakistocracy doesn't exactly attract the best and the brightest, and it hasn't for some time.
